by Toby Litt
They moved in together, buying at a bargain price the Notting Hill flat that would later be Lily’s.
In 1968 they married. A full Catholic ceremony. Josephine had had to convert.
Things began to go wrong almost immediately. The Mistake refused to drop LSD during their San Francisco honeymoon. Josephine did anyway, and was seduced during a marathon session of luminous body-painting by the hippie who’d sold it to her. The Mistake had joined in for a while – drawing an upside-down Union Jack around his belly button. The end had already begun. Yet they stayed together for years after it had become clear they had nothing between them to prolong but disaster. Lily’s conception was their big mistake of 1972. They were almost separated at that point – but alcohol and Josephine’s desire to redeem The Mistake by in some way liberating Robert had brought them again to bed. Whatever else happened, they never stopped fancying each other.
In 1974, they divorced. Josephine kept Lily, uncontested.
In the years since, The Mistake had become a man one couldn’t help but admire, even though he was never likely to gain one’s respect. He had moved upwards from auctioneering into estate valuations, from insurance to equity. He knew how things (in his limited version of the world) should be. He went to the best bespoke tailor on Savile Row, entrusted him with all decisions relating to cloth, cut and cost; and came away a very well-dressed if never particularly stylish man. He knew the finest and obscurest brand of soap, where it was stocked, how much it had cost when he first bought it in 1965, and a couple of good – if slightly risqué – jokes concerning soap. When one visited his Kensington mews, one found – in the bathroom, on the window shelf – a complete set of first edition Hoffnungs. He himself was almost completely without humour – although if to incarnate the ludicrousness of an entire generation is to be without humour, then life is an unnecessarily harsh affair. (As you might say.)
He was the perfect host – with all the deficiencies that implies.
During the time I was going out with Lily, we met only rarely – hacking our way towards each other through a jungle of awkwardness and embarrassment. Yet somehow, however much conversational machete-work we put in, the jungle was always far too thick for us, and we never managed – or so I felt – to end up simply face to face.
All that passed between us were lost cries of ‘Where are you?’ and ‘Over here.’
17
When I opened the door to him the day after his phonecall, The Mistake stood there utterly unchanged.
He was tall with a slight stoop, and had very large hands and feet. His hair was plastered down with some outdated lotion which retained the comb’s every last tooth-mark in semi-solid form. His face was a lightly orangy-pink ball whose features seemed never to know where to put themselves unless, as now, they were expressing a conventional sentiment in a conventional way. He was wearing one of his navy blue pinstripe suits.
‘Conrad,’ he said, glancing down at my wheelchair, ‘it’s good to see you.’
Looking back, I think he may even have prepared a hug for this grief-shadowed reunion. But, when the moment arrived, he merely bent down, took my hand and shook it slowly.
Entering the living room, he looked around for something on which to compliment me – décorwise.
‘Gosh,’ he said, finding nothing. ‘Lovely and warm in here. Central heating, I suppose.’
I offered him a seat.
The tea things were out ready on the coffee table. When I offered, he said, ‘Oh yes please,’ and I poured him a cup.
‘You seem to be doing very well,’ he said.
‘It’s not permanent,’ I replied, meaning the wheelchair.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I hope not.’
In the silence that followed, he tea-slurped rather loudly.
‘How are the cats?’ I asked.
Just before we split up, Lily had bought two black and white kittens, Perhaps I should have taken it as a pack-your-bags sign – and not the first. Lily had always loved cats and had wanted more than one. The kittens, when they first arrived, got into so many object-scrapes that we called them Snafu and Glitch. They seemed happiest only when at a point exactly half-way up the back of Lily’s black leather sofa – chasing each other in mad ripping circles while Lily and I tried to concentrate on a video or sex. Snafu in particular liked to join in with sex. She wanted to rake her claws through our hairy bits. I think she thought they were unformed or shy kittens, in need of a bit of catty-coaxing to bring them out.
The Mistake placed his cup and saucer down on the brown glass of the coffee-table.
‘Do you want them – the cats, I mean?’
‘I don’t think I could really cope with them at the moment,’ I said. ‘But maybe in future.’
‘I’m sure Josephine would hand them over.’
‘Didn’t you have them?’
‘Perhaps I’d better explain.’
He explained. It took a while – but listening past the euphemism and evasion, the story went something like this: Arrangements for Lily’s burial had naturally brought The Mistake and Josephine into closer contact than usual. However, it was not until the morning of the funeral that they actually met. Although both had friends and lovers to support them, they (as the stricken parents) found themselves being pulled together by the gravity of their grief. Pretty soon they were in tears, next in each other’s arms, and – by the end of that terrible day – in bed.
(Although I didn’t interrupt to tell him, one of Lily’s most frequently recurrent nightmares had been of her parents sentimentally reuniting while on the dance-floor at her wedding.)
The Mistake was still living in the mews house where Lily had spent the first two years of her life. A week after the funeral, Josephine moved back in. The Mistake may have been Josephine’s only mistake, but – though her daughter wasn’t around to witness it – it was one she was quite capable of repeating. My interpretation was that, to compensate for her grief, Josephine wanted some solidity. The Mistake was nothing if not solid. And although his solidity was one of the main reasons she had left him in the first place, it made him no less attractive now.
The reunion lasted two months. Josephine moved out again, back to her old flat in Hampstead. She took the cats with her, although The Mistake insisted he’d become particularly fond of them. Since that day contact between them had been minimal.
‘Glitch has put on a bit of weight. I think Josephine is feeding them too often.’
He looked down into the shine on his shoes.
It was time for me to find out what our subject really was.
‘You had something to tell me?’
‘Not really. More to ask you, really. Um, on the night you went to the restaurant with Lily – did she have anything, you think, in particular that she wanted to discuss?’
‘Definitely.’
He picked up his cup and saucer again – and started adjusting the cup’s handles through right angles: 12 o’clock, 9 o’clock, 3 o’clock, 6 o’clock.
‘What was it?’
‘Perhaps it was something private between Lily and myself.’
‘Of course,’ he said quickly.
He put the cup and saucer down. His tea was all drunk. He’d had no reason for picking it up again, apart from the imperative of guilty fiddling.
‘But if you did feel in any way able to tell me, I would be very grateful.’
‘She didn’t say anything about you if that’s what you’re worrying about.’
It was obvious that he was worrying about something.
‘No, no, no.’
‘Or Josephine.’
‘It was more about herself, actually. Whether she had anything to tell you about herself.’
‘Perhaps you’d better tell me what you think she might have said, then I can tell you whether she said it or not.’
‘It’s not so much that I want to find out what it was. I think I know what it was. What I’d like to know is whether she thought it worth while telling y
ou – whether she particularly wanted to tell you – whether you were particularly involved in any way.’
‘Robert,’ I said. ‘You’re not making yourself particularly clear. What do you mean?’
‘So she didn’t?’ he said.
‘Didn’t what?’
‘If she had, you’d know exactly what I’ve been talking about.’
He stood up.
‘Thank you very much for the tea,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve answered my question. Don’t worry, I’ll show myself out. Nice to see you, Conrad.’
‘Tell me,’ I said.
‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think it’s quite my place to tell you.’
‘Do you know what we called you?’ I shouted. ‘What Lily and I called you?’
‘What?’ he said, turning awkwardly in the doorway.
‘We called you The Mistake.’
‘Really?’ he said, slowly. ‘How…’
He turned away again.
‘… original.’
18
After The Mistake left I had plenty of time to think about our conversation. There was something he knew, but didn’t want me to know – or didn’t want to be the one to tell me. And it was something to do with what Lily had wanted to discuss during our meal. I guessed that it was to do with changing her will – some kind of verbal contract. Perhaps he intended to contest?
There seemed only one thing to do. Divorcees always have one major weakness: their ex. If The Mistake didn’t want to tell me what was going on, then – merely by being informed of his taciturnity – Josephine would almost certainly want to blab the whole thing. I would simply be providing yet another opportunity for her to vent her bitterness.
Josephine, having gracefully given up opera-singing, was now a writer. She had just two years before published her first novel, Root Ginger. One hundred and eighty pages, and not one of them without the long lilting cadence of forced pathos. Her moral was always and everywhere: Pity me, I have suffered. But she hadn’t – she was pampered constantly by everyone around her. Even her reviewers (mostly female) pampered her. (I’m sure out of sheer relief that she hadn’t forced upon them another set of diva-ish memoirs.) A second novel, Brocade, was said to be ‘in the making’.
Josephine had been with The Mistake for two months after Lily’s death. If what he knew was something he’d found out during that time, she would surely know it as well. More likely, Josephine had been first to learn it. The Mistake had always received most of his information about Lily at second hand.
The last time I’d seen Josephine had been about two months before Lily and I split up. She had come round to collect Lily and whisk her off to lunch somewhere far more expensive than she’d ever have taken the both of us together. We were unspoken though unsworn enemies by that point: she (rightly, perhaps) believed that I wasn’t good enough for Lily – wasn’t manly or fatherly enough. In her eyes, Lily needed someone to guide her towards the success that should rightfully (genetically) be hers: Lily’s place was on the stage, not the TV. I stood for TV.
Lily was very careful to pass off on to me her own strong desire to be famous first and a good actress second. To her mother, she would make the ritual complaints about lack of work, of really satisfying work. Then she would sophisticate on for a while about the high fees of the cereal ad, the freedom and time it would give her to find something really worth while. And Josephine would be taken in: Lily pulled the act off brilliantly. She was the struggling artist; I was the debaser of genius.
No doubt Josephine also part-blamed me for getting her lovely daughter shot, killed and posthumously notorious. And, if she didn’t blame me for having survived whilst Lily died, then Josephine would hardly have been human.
When I phoned her, her response was typical.
‘Oh, Conrad. I was going to get in touch just as soon as I knew you were recovered.’
I had decided not to mention The Mistake and his little visit until I’d had more time to think about the situation.
‘I’m getting better every day, thank you. I was wondering if we could meet up some time to talk about Lily.’
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘I need to talk.’
‘Is there anything in particular?’
I didn’t tell her how much like her ex-husband she was starting to sound.
‘There are things I need to say.’
‘Of course.’ She paused. ‘I’m not particularly busy at the moment. How about tomorrow morning?’
Josephine and I agreed to meet up at Lily’s flat – that would give her a chance – ‘perhaps a last chance,’ she said, parenthetically, pathetically – to look round. It would also enable me to take possession of the keys and the flat at one and the same time.
‘How are Snafu and Glitch?’ I asked.
We talked about Glitch for five minutes and Snafu for two.
19
The flat had been renovated by a young architect so up-and-coming that, if Lily hadn’t seized him exactly when she did, he would have been out of her price range by the end of the following month. He talked the builders into producing what he, and therefore she, wanted: whitewashed walls, polished pine floors, split bamboo blinds lined with muslin, concealed lighting, stainless steel ornaments. He had created for her – as one of the magazine articles said – ‘an atmosphere of light and space – and, most importantly of all, calm’. That, at least, was how it must’ve appeared to those that didn’t actually have to live there.
I turned up fifteen minutes early, knowing that Josephine would be there already. She couldn’t resist the chance of one final check around Lily’s flat, just to make sure there was nothing she’d overlooked. I felt sure that many little things (‘of sentimental value’) were going to be missing. Nothing important enough for me to accuse her of stealing. But just enough to let me know that although, legally, the flat now belonged to me, morally it was theirs – to divide between them, just as they’d attempted but failed to divide Lily.
I had to wait for a minute or so on the doorstep before Josephine deigned to buzz me in: this was the final gesture of possession, after this she could but capitulate to my oikish invasion.
I wondered how much time she’d spent in Lily’s flat over the past six months. Was it her mourning place? Had it become the place where she brought: her lovers? Could she bear to fuck them in the bed that Lily and I had shared?
Josephine was one of those unfortunate women who have been born out of the proper time of their best beauty. Her face and figure were those of a Forces Sweetheart, circa 1943.
Yet the Josephine who finally opened the door at the top of the stairs to me was a smaller, sadder, older woman than the one who’d taken Lily out to lunch that day. She was harder, as well – as if to say, Death has taught me a lesson which I must pass on to others; if, in doing so, I myself become a little deathly, a little creepy, then so be it: this is not a vocation that I would have chosen – black never suited me. However, all such questions and preferences are vanity now.
The hall smelt of something faintly disgusting.
Josephine had expected me to be early – not this early, though. I’d caught her ten minutes before I was due. Her first reaction was one of anger, and the only emotion she could find to disguise it was pity.
‘Conrad, my God – you look terrible… Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything, should I? But it’s just you’ve lost some weight. Sit down – you must sit down. I’m afraid I can’t offer you tea or anything – the power’s off, you see… and the gas. I bring it for myself. In a flask. When I come; when I used to come… I suppose that’s all over now. Do you think you’re going to move in?’
I didn’t answer. I did not sit down. I hadn’t passed more than a step over the threshold. I had just walked back into my old life – into a room I’d expected never to see again. Lily wouldn’t have wanted me back in her flat – and I would have done anything to avoid a return that couldn’t fail to hurt me
by being merely temporary. Now that I was here, though, I felt as if I were doubly trespassing: I was back without Lily’s permission, and her permission was something she was no longer around either to give or to withhold.
It was only on entering the flat that I realized quite how dead my old life was, and how dead Lily was, too.
The last thing I wanted was for Josephine to see me in my weakness. There was no way of avoiding it, however.
I walked very consciously over to the sofa. It felt as if my every step was leaving a deep footprint in the fresh wet earth of Lily’s new-dug grave.
The living room was done out like the reception of a large corporation: black leather sofa and chairs, pale wooden floor, oblong glass coffee table – even down to the industrial stainless-steel ashtrays-on-stalks.
‘Are you alright?’ asked Josephine, glad to be able to assert herself.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I just need a couple of minutes. The stairs.’